Selected Technology Articles from the Week

A Logo is one aspect of any blog or a company’s commercial brand which is used to identify different sites or blogs or a particular brand. Logo design is an important area of graphic design, and one of the most difficult to perfect.

IT, deals, debt Wade Roush wrote: Jackpot Rewards, a Newton, MA-based startup that runs cash-back rewards programs and sweepstakes for online shoppers, has raised just over $12 million in new financing in the form of convertible debt, according to regulatory documents filed today. We profiled the company in February 2008, when it first announced its plans to give away a $1 million jackpot every week; the company generated controversy late…

Three quick tips from Google on managing your personal reputation online. What’s notable here is how integrated PR is in doing so… "If you can’t get the content removed from the original site, you probably won’t be able to completely remove it from Google’s search results, either. Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business." Big f…

Twitter rolled out a limited beta of its new lists feature to a larger number of users late last night. With these new lists, Twitter users can now organize their friends into groups. By default, these lists are private, but one of the most interesting aspects of this new feature is that users can also make their lists public – something many Twitter users have been looking forward to for a long time. Sponsor Third-party Twitter clients and t…

Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra, fresh off a new funding and site relaunch, is showing some of the highlights from their annual State of the Blogosphere report today at BlogWorld in Las Vegas. We’ll have a video of his full video presentation shortly. In the meantime, we’re embedding the power point presentation below. Key points Jalichandra brought up – What’s the no. 1 success metric for a professional blogger? What do successful bl…

Optimists hoping that venture capital investing might be bouncing back will be disappointed by the latest numbers from Dow Jones VentureSource. After venture investments saw an encouraging uptick during the second quarter of 2009, they dipped again in the last three months. Specifically, VCs invested $5.1 billion in 616 deals during Q3. That’s down 38 percent from the $8.2 billion invested during the same period last year, a drop you’d expec…

Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick kicked off our Real-Time Web Summit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View today. Marshall, who spoke with over 40 different vendors over the last few months in preparation for this event, presented a high-level overview of what he thinks the recent developments around the real-time web will mean for companies and users. Specifically, Marshall stressed the fact that real time doesn’t just mean speed but also…

You have to be bold these days to be noticed! You have to wear some funky stuff to look a bit cooler. So after the huge success of our article on websites using popping colors we decided to make a WP themes roundup as well. Pandora | $30 | Details | Demo Pandora is a WordPress Template, designed to promote anything from a corporate business to a portfolio site Blogus | $45 + a FREE theme | Details | Demo Blogus theme is perfect for a world tra…

Apple iPhone developers now have the option to offer in-app content purchases within free software; previously, such functionality was available only within paid applications. The expanded capability was reported by Macworld, citing a screenshot of an iPhone Developer Program notice. It means iPhone developers finally have full access to the so-called "free-to-play" business model, most common in online PC games, which offers the base client at n…

Google Wave, the company’s new real-time collaboration platform currently in private beta, is more secure than traditional email, claims the company. According to Greg D’alesandre, Google Wave product manager, that’s because Google has focused on addressing privacy and security issues as the product was built from the ground up instead of waiting to deal with them later. Speaking to media in Sydney today, he detailed several of Wave’s security fe…

Membership websites have increased in popularity in recent years. They present an excellent income opportunity for the site owner and a great value (depending on the content) for users. If you have thought about setting up a membership site but weren’t sure where to get started, here is a look at 14 options that will allow you to get started with your own membership site. AMember AMember is probably the most popular choice for managing a member…

The mobile augmented reality space continues to heat up, with Wikitude and Layar on Android and the Yelp Monocle debuting AR on the iPhone. Today another iPhone app gets the augmented reality treatment, this time with restaurant-finding Urbanspoon’s new “Scope” feature. The AR adds to Urbanspoon’s existing featureset, where you can browse or search for a good restaurant nearby or, with a surprisingly fun gesture, shake the phone to get a…

VC, deals, startups Robert Buderi wrote: It wasn’t just school that people got back to in September—it was startup funding. After slowing noticeably in August, the total venture investment into Massachusetts startups last month hit its highest level since we began tracking the monthly figures in June. All told, investors put $228 million into 25 deals involving Bay State startups. That was good enough to eclipse the $215 million (als…

Building a comprehensive 3-D model of the world is definitely not going to be a top-down task. So Google Earth is taking a page from the company’s crowdsourced success with Map Maker and is asking people to help create 3-D versions of buildings around the world. They’ve kept the program fairly simple. You don’t have to create a building from scratch: instead you make it from photos that already exist within Google Earth and give them a thre…

This is just a quick service announcement: Twitter is investigating an issue with users becoming locked out of the service after changing their email address or username, or resetting their passwords. In the meantime: do not change your password, email address or Twitter handle. Until Twitter corrects the issue, it’s best not to attempt any of these changes at this time. They go on to say that if you have made any of these changes but do manag…

Last week in the Mashable Chat, Pete and Robert Scoble were discussing FriendFeed and some of the reasons the service failed to take off with mainstream users. The influx of information, the inability to control what you see and the overall ease-of-use were all reasons mentioned why the service will probably be better used as technology infrastructure for Facebook rather than something users use in and of itself. Today, the social networking serv…

Google Wave, the search giant’s latest experiment in post-email communications, is hardly out the gate, with some of the first 100,000 private beta testers still waiting for their invites. (I just finally got mine today, two weeks after launch). But Google Wave already has a few secrets. The one that surprised me is that even though not that many people can use it yet, Google Wave already works on the iPhone. There are two ways to get Goo…

David Laubner is an expert in the field of marketing and product management. His background includes numerous technology product launches and the founding of several internet startups.
Follow David on Twitter | LinkedIn